http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
I NEED YOUR MONEY to promote my column. So, I want you empty your wallet or
pocketbook (just the currency, you can keep the change) and send me the
contents. A refusal would constitute interference with the exercise of my
First Amendment rights.

I would like to come into your home during dinner this evening and harangue
you on a variety of political topics. If you bar the door, you are a censor
intent on suppressing my freedom of expression.

That is the logical extension of the most fatuous argument advanced by the
lobotomized left in defense of public funding for anti-Christian art on
display at the Brooklyn Museum.

The museum gets $7 million annually from New York City. Mayor and
prospective Senate candidate Rudolph Giuliani has threatened to yank this
support over the show, "Sensation: Young British Artists." One of the
sensationally immature Brits has committed something called "The Holy Virgin
Mary," an icon done in elephant dung.

Liberals are convinced that when the First Amendment says, "Congress shall
make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech," it really means
"government must fund artistic expression -- even when it offends the
deepest sensibilities of millions of taxpayers."

In other words, artists can't express themselves without state subsidies.

To deny government grants to painters (or the museums that exhibit their
works) is to gag them, to break their easels and brushes, and to pollute
their palettes.

Or as Hillary Rodham Clinton -- also a probable Senate candidate as well as
a First Amendment scholar -- put it, "Our feelings of being offended should
not lead to penalizing and shutting down an entire
museum."

Shutting down? Is Giuliani sending the police to Brooklyn to chase
museum-goers from the premises, smash the offending work and padlock the
doors?

For the first lady, cutting funding for a cultural forum she favors is the
same as brown-shirted brutes consigning controversial books to the flames.

Something tells me that Ms. Rodham would be far less tolerant if that which
she reveres were under attack. If government gelt went to displaying a
portrait of, say, Betty Friedan covered in excrement, there Hillary would
most certainly draw the line.

If the First Amendment requires subsidies for art, then government is
committing countless of acts of censorship daily.

Obviously, only a tiny fraction of the paintings, sculptures and
photography produced in this country each year is patronized by government.
That must mean the rest is being censored?

Who decides what art is worthy of support? Do we poll the American people?
("All in favor of paying for a showing of Adres Serrano's 'Piss Christ'
please raise your hands"?) If the majority ruled, the National Endowment for
the Arts would simply transfer its annual appropriation to the Norman
Rockwell Museum.

The public has no say in the matter. Instead, the NEA and other arts
agencies dole out millions to favored institutions run by an aesthetic elite
that determines where the money goes.

Increasingly, the taste of this avant-garde runs to representations or
displays of -- feces, urine, sadomasochism, same-sex erotica, carcasses,
severed heads, vomit, genitalia, the desecration of sacred objects and other
therapy projects of mental patients.

It is good for the public to be exposed to this stuff, the arts elite tells
us. It's provocative. It challenges us.

Naturally, it is only middle-class mores and Judeo-Christian traditions
that must be challenged, never the values and vision of the cognoscenti.
Imagine how they'd react to a painting of Robert Mapplethorpe in hell,
adorned with a suitable verse from Leviticus.

If a right can only be exercised through the treasury, then the Government
Printing Office is abridging the religious liberty of millions of
Protestants by not producing King James Bibles to meet the annual demand.

By not providing hunting rifles and pistols for members of the National
Rifle Association, government is violating their Second Amendment right to
keep and bear arms. And by not buying media outlets for everyone with a
political opinion, it has nullified freedom of the press.

So, when I show up at your doorstep this evening, you can either allow me
to expound my theories on your property or you will stand exposed as a
club-wielding member of the thought
police.